Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Transnational Studies

Susan E. Gray - Biographical Statement

Susan E. Gray is associate professor of history in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. Her major publications include The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier, a co-edited volume, The American Midwest: Essays in Regional History. From 2003 to 2012, she served as co-editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, and a number of essays. Recent publications include a second-co-edited volume, Contingent Maps: Re-thinking the North American West and Western Women's History (forthcoming, University of Arizona Press). At present, Gray is completing Lines of Descent: Family Stories from the North Country, a multigenerational biography of mixed-race, Odawa and white family, based on their personal narratives, for the University of North Carolina Press. She will pursue threads from these stories across the U.S./Canadian border in her new project, a biography of two Odawa cousins, Francis Assikinack and Andrew J. Blackbird, for which she has been awarded a 2012-13 Fulbright Fellowship to Canada. Gray was the ASU coordinator for a "Teaching across Borders" initiative linking history faculty and graduate students at Arizona State and York Universities that was supported by a grant from the International Council for Canadian Studies. An account of this collaboration was published in both the Bulletin of the Canadian Historical Association and Perspectives, the news magazine of the American Historical Association. Gray has held major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University. In 2000 she was visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.

Presentations:"From Homeland to Bordered Lands? Great Lakes Geopolitics and Odawa Family History after 1815."Keynote address for the 'Crossing Borders' and 'Two Day of Canada' conferencesThursday, March 14, 2013 at 7:00 pm, Pond Inlet

After 1815, the imposition of the international border through the traditional Odawa homeland in the western Great Lakes marked the subjection of Anishinaabeg to colonial rule by either American republic or British empire. The strategies developed by different members of the same Odawa family in Upper Canada and Michigan to deal with the new geopolitical and colonial reality demonstrate the continued flow of people and their ideas around their homeland.

"Of Two Worlds and Intimate Domains: Thinking about Place and Indigenous-Settler Relations."Friday, March 22, 2013 at 3:00 pm, 573 Glenridge - Room 201

About the paper: it is a book chapter in a forthcoming collection, entitled Beyond Two Worlds, edited by Joseph Genetin-Pilawa and James J. Buss. The purpose of the volume is to consider the role of concepts of space and place in ethnohistory in an attempt to break down and through the older, but still reigning, model of seperate Indigenous ways of doing and being. Senior contributors were asked to write "interludes" or thought pieces, rather than more straightforward reports on their research.